NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Review

Catering to those who demand great GPU performance for a modest price, NVIDIA has launched its $130 $150 GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Compared to the GTS 450 which it replaces, the GTX 550 Ti delivers faster performance, a beefier memory bus and what NVIDIA touts as being one of the best performance per watt ratios around.

Metro 2033

One of the more popular Internet memes for the past couple of years has been, “Can it run Crysis?”, but as soon as Metro 2033 launched, that’s a meme that should have died. Metro 2033 is without question one of the beefiest games on the market, and though it supports DirectX 11, it’s almost a feature worth ignoring, because the extent you’ll need to go to in order to see playable framerates isn’t likely going to be worth it.

Manual Run-through: The level we use for testing is part of chapter 4, called “Child”, where we must follow a linear path through multiple corridors until we reach our end point, which takes a total of about 90 seconds. Please note that due to the reason mentioned above, we test this game in DX10 mode, as DX11 simply isn’t that realistic from a performance standpoint.

We have quite a comeback here. While AMD’s HD 5770 surpassed the performance of the GTX 550 Ti slightly in both Just Cause 2 and Mafia II, NVIDIA’s card took control with Metro 2033, which again, is typically weighted towards AMD cards, for whatever reason. With “High” detail levels at 1650×1080, the game was surprisingly very playable with NVIDIA’s budget card.